... just tried a reiserfs (ver 3, loopback mounted ) for metadata and it seems to be very space efficient: 33 GB worth of data (about 22000 files) can be represented using 115 MB of real storage. 3GB (Fedora RAWHIDE's SRPMS), 1215 files need 7.6 MB - the files are bigger in average not so bad :-) Konrad